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On Tuesday night, July 3rd, we took data of our own using the 40-inch telescope at Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton. We took images of the globular clusters M5 and M13. We also took images of standard stars; these are like lightbulbs whose wattages we know, so that we can compare our stars with these known stars to get the brightnesses (magnitudes). That step is called calibration.
Before we got started that night, Ellie (the astronomer in the control room at Mt. Hamilton) had taken bias frames and flat-fields for us. These help us remove defects and blemishes that the CCD leaves on our images. Here is a sample bias, and than a sample flat-field (you can click on them if you want them even bigger):
We used the biases and flat-fields to improve our images as much as we could, using IRAF and tasks like colbias, imcombine and imarith. Since the CCD at the 40-inch is pretty good, there wasn't a lot of room for improvement anyway. Here's a big table of all the images we took, both in their "raw" form and after we did the bias-correction and flat-fielding step:
